Why someone chooses to end their life is often an impossibly complex, and unanswerable problem. Husbands, wives, parents, best friends and colleagues, each left devastated and bewildered. Each with questions that will likely never be answered. No matter how close, how tuned in, or loving, they are, too often ‘why why he did it’ remains a haunting mystery that never goes away. And yet when it comes to discussion of male suicide, there now arrives armies of insensitive, and narrow minded fools who claim to have the answer, and not just to one, but to all male suicides. An answer that is easy to remember, and doesn’t invite may questions. ‘Toxic masculinity!!’ And that’s it. The catch all term that erases individuality, lived experience and context, that dehumanises the person, and replaces them with meaningless ambiguity. No longer do we see a man struggling at work, a man losing his house, a man deprived of his children, a man abused at home, or in childhood, a lonely man, a man struggling with an addiction, or burdened with ill physical health. Context be gone! No. He’s just toxic, the problem is in his head and can be solved through a simple change of male mindset. There are even psychologists, the lowest of the low, working directly with vulnerable men, who arrogantly buy into this outrageous, divisive and simple thinking. So too there are ‘enlightened’ people out there who will take your money to retrain and reeducate your masculinity, through underqualified ‘workshops’. It reeks of the treatment that women were subjected to one hundred years ago; but no longer ‘female hysteria’ but ‘toxic masculinity’, with the same psudoscientific mumbo jumbo, same snake oil , and same exploitation of the vulneabble. So to the men, please know, you are *not* toxic. You are not broken, problematic or deffective, you are worthy and deserving of care and compassion. So is it time we finally asked, is the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’, itself toxic? Do men not deserve better? ~ Sexual Assault of Boys  NVDR [1] ~ Images by Meysam Jarahkar and A-Z from Unsplash. #mensmentalhealth #malesuicide

2022-11-21